Saturday, December 8, 2007

Attempting To Tag Intelligently

My recent forays into blinklist, ma.gnolia, and digg made me decide to go through and redo my tags - deleting all of the tags in these systems and revamping my tags under del.icio.us. As I stated in a previous post, there were some websites booked marked on blinklist as "economics" which in truth did not fit that label. Even for my own use, indiscriminately tagging a website with every possible tag seems to go against the concept of organized knowledge or intelligence. It seems to be a matter of cutting down clutter. I de-tagged a number of sites. My next step will be to investigate those tags which have only a few occurrences to determine if there are in fact useful. This is all based upon my recent reading of "The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems" by Scott A. Golder and Bernardo A. Huberman of Information Dynamics Lab, HP Labs.

Its still difficult to assign websites to specific categories even when you have a number to choose from and I have a new found respect for librarians. The web, however, is even harder to delineate as a book usually has a finite and focused purpose but a website especially one like TED can have multiple resources and multiple purposes. The tag "economics" has a wide ranging applicability and works at multiple levels. Other tags forced thinking as to how I wanted it defined. "Development", I decided was the process that took place in realizing a economic implementation after research, design and planning. But even then its not so simple to place a particular website on one side of the fence of the other. Does the Clinton Foundation do development as I defined it? Yes, there is a component of the Clinton Foundation directly involved in development.

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